After imaging faint galaxies for a few months, I felt like imaging a bright, relatively easy target when some clear skies unexpectedly appeared in early January.  M45, the Pleiades, is surrounded by that faint emission nebulosity that my childhood astronomy books told me was only visible in long exposure photographs.  How times have changed; a single 5-minute sub with just about any CCD or CMOS camera will easily capture the nebulosity these days.

While I was working on the processing, Uwe Deutermann posted essentially the same image taken with 5-minute subs in the luminance channel.  I laughed a bit, as I had just done nearly the same "little experiment" with similar framing, so here is the result (with only 5 minutes difference in integration time!).  It turns out I used 2-minute RGB exposures, not 5 min. as I had thought.  Looks like Uwe had larger aperture at his disposal, but he had to fight off the light pollution from his site, whereas my Bortle 4/5 backyard is good enough for the Pleiades.  I don't think there is a tremendous difference between our images besides the choices we made in stretching and histogram balance, so Uwe can rest assured that he tamed the LP.  On my end, it's worth mentioning that I ended up with awful RGB gradients that were hard to process out, despite darker skies.  The target rises in the east (Bortle 4) and progresses into the light dome from Albany, NY (Bortle 5) at my location.  It seems that the gradient in LP causes just as many problems as the absolute value of the sky brightness!

Link to Uwe's image:  https://astrob.in/7ag3o9/0/

There is another interesting note for QHY268M owners.  This image was captured entirely in Mode 3 (Extended Fullwell 2CMS-1) to reduce the over-exposure of the bright stars.  I have now had the camera for a long enough time to make a comment on (Mode 3 / Gain 14) vs. (Mode 1 / Gain 0) for LRGB imaging.  I initially thought the background noise was lower with the  (Mode 1 / Gain 0) setting from single subs, but comparison of dithered 1-hour stacks (300 s subs) with different filters suggested there was no advantage to either mode in terms of noise or the limiting magnitude of the DSOs detected.  Mode 3 produces fewer burned-out stars due to greater well depth, so I plan to stick with it for LRGB imaging until someone convinces me otherwise.  Maybe there is a difference with short subs?